I look forward to a thoughtful exchange, and I hope that whoever is reading this debate, even Con, will read this without the thoughts already set in stone in your mind and take this with an open mind.

Throughout this debate, I will be asserting that God is real and that He is the Creator.

We live in a world in which we can see evidence surrounding us that God exists. For example, the fine-tuning of life. We would not be here if the gravitational force, electromagnetic force, ratio mass for protons and electrons, etc. was off by a unit something as small as one part in 10 to the 40th power, or even less than that. There are so many examples of fine-tuning, it would be next to impossible for life to reign and even thrive on Earth. The possibility of this specific world we live in is so small that it would only be right for a Creator.

The Bible, which is a historically accurate source, tells us that there was a man named Jesus, who was God's son, and he rose from the dead. God can only raise people from the dead, so the resurrection calls for a God. If you might challenge that Jesus did NOT get resurrected, just mention it and I will give my reasoning behind the assertion.

God has been worshipped for thousands and thousands of years now. How would He be celebrated for so long if God was just a hoax made up by humans? God was obviously not just a made up figure; He was actually leading the Israelites by his voice and through prophets.

There is just too much evidence that there is a God, and absolutely no evidence that there isn't. I look forward to Con's response.

Again thank you, and I apologise for the length of this: but, I will be taking the side of Atheist:

Since the mid-1960s, scientifically-informed theists have been ecstatic because of Big bang cosmology. Theists believe the best scientific evidence that God exists is the evidence that the universe began to exist in an explosion about fifteen billion years ago. It began in an explosion called the Big Bang. Theists think it obvious that the universe could not have begun to exist uncaused. They argue that the most reasonable hypothesis is that the cause of the universe is God. This theory hinges on the assumption that it is obviously true that whatever begins to exist has a cause. The most recent statement of this theist theory is in William Lane Craig's 1994 book Reasonable Faith [1]. Now there is a very interesting quote from this book which I will read to you at length because, at the end of this quote, Craig mentions me as one of the perverse atheists who deny the obviousness of the theistic principle. So let me quote to you how Craig states his argument [2]:The first step is so intuitively obvious that I think scarcely anyone could sincerely believe it to be false. I therefore think it somewhat unwise to argue in favor of it, for any proof of the principle is likely to be less obvious than the principle itself. And as Aristotle remarked, one ought not to try to prove the obvious via the less obvious. The old axiom that "out of nothing, nothing comes" remains as obvious today as ever. When I first wrote The Kalam Cosmological Argument, I remarked that I found it an attractive feature of this argument that it allows the atheist as a way of escape: he can always deny the first premiss and assert the universe sprang into existence uncaused out of nothing. I figured that few would take this option, since I believed they would thereby expose themselves as persons interested only in academic refutation of the argument and not in really discovering the truth about the universe. To my surprise, however, atheists seem to be increasingly taking this route. For example, Quentin Smith, commenting that philosophers are too often adversely affected by Heidegger's dread of "the nothing," concludes that "the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing" -- a nice ending to a sort of Gettysburg address of atheism, perhaps. [3]
I'm going to criticize this argument from scientific cosmology which is the most popular argument that scientifically-informed theists and philosophers are now using to argue that God exists.

Let's consider the premise of the argument. The premise is that whatever has a beginning to its existence must have a cause. What reason is there to believe this causal principle is true? It's not self-evident; something is self-evident if and only if everyone who understands it automatically believes it. But many people, including leading theists such as Richard Swinburne, understand this principle very well but think it's false. Many philosophers, scientists, and indeed the majority of graduate and undergraduate students I've had in my classes think this principle is false. This principle is not self-evident, nor can this principle be deduced from any self-evident proposition. Therefore there's no reason to think it's true. It is either false or it has the status of a statement we do not know if it's true or false. At the very least, it is clear that we do not know that it is true.

Now suppose the theist retreats to a weaker version of this principle. Suppose the theist says that a weaker version of this principle is, "whatever has a beginning to its existence has a cause." Now this does not say that whatever has a beginning to its existence must have a cause; it allows that it is possible that some things begin to exist without a cause. So we don't need to consider it as a self-evident, necessary truth. Rather, we can consider it to be an empirical generalization based on observation, according to the theists. But there is a decisive problem with this line of thinking. There's absolutely no evidence that it is true. All of the observations we have are of changes in things -- of something changing from one state to another. Things move, come to a rest, get larger, get smaller, combine with other things, divide in half, and so on. But we have no observation of things coming into existence. For example, we have no observations of people coming into existence. Here again, you merely have a change of things. An egg cell and a sperm cell change their state by combining together. The combination divides, enlarges, and eventually evolves into an adult human being. Therefore I conclude that we have no evidence at all that the empirical version of Craig's statement, "Whatever begins to exist has a cause," is true. All of the causes we are aware of are changes in pre-existing materials. In Craig's and other theist's causal principle, "cause" means something entirely different: it means creating material from nothingness. It is pure speculation that such a strange sort of causation is even possible, let alone even supported in our observations in our daily lives.

But the more important point is this: not only is there no evidence for the theist's case, there's evidence against it. The claim that the beginning of our universe has a cause conflicts with current scientific theory. The scientific theory is called the wave function of the universe. It has been developed in the past ten years or so by Stephen Hawking, Andre Vilenkin, Alex Linde, and many others. Their theory is that there is a scientific law of nature called the Wave Function of the Universe that implies that it is highly probable that a universe with our characteristics will come into existence without a cause. Hawking's theory is based on assigning numbers to all possible universes. All of the numbers cancel out except for a universe with features our universe possesses. For example, contains intelligent organisms such as humans. This remaining universe has a certain probability very high -- near to a hundred percent -- of coming into existence uncaused.

Hawking's theory is confirmed by observational evidence. This theory predicts our universe has evenly-distributed matter on a large scale, which would be on scales of super-clusters of galaxies. It predicts that the expansion rate of our universe -- our universe has been expanding ever since -- would be almost exactly between the rate of the universe expanding forever and the rate where it expands and then collapses. It also predicts the very early area of rapid expansion near the beginning of the universe called inflation. Hawking's theory exactly predicted what the COBE satellite discovered about the irregularities of the background radiation in the universe. So a scientific theory that is confirmed by observational evidence tells us that the universe began without being caused. So if you want to be a rational person and accepts the results of rational inquiry into nature, then we must accept the fact that God did not cause the universe to exist. The universe exists because of this wave-function law.

Now Stephen Hawking's theory dissolves any worries about how the universe could begin to exist uncaused. He supposes that there is a timeless space, a four-dimensional hypersphere, near the beginning of the universe. It is smaller than the nucleus of an atom. It is smaller than 10^-33 centimeters in radius. Since it was timeless, it no more needs a cause than the timeless god of theism. This timeless hypersphere is connected to our expanding universe. Our universe begins smaller than an atom and explodes in a Big Bang and here we are today in a universe that is still expanding. Is it nonetheless possible that God could have caused this universe? No. For the wave function of the universe implies there is a 95% probability that the universe came into existence uncaused. If God created the universe, he would contradict this scientific law in two ways. First, the scientific law says that the universe would come into existence because of its natural, mathematical properties, not because of any supernatural forces. Second, the scientific law says the probability is only 95% that the universe would come into existence. But if God created the universe, the probability would be 100% that it would come into existence because God is all-powerful. If God wills the universe to come into existence, his will is guaranteed to be 100% effective.

So in conclusion, contemporary scientific cosmology is not only not supported by any theistic theory, it is actually logically inconsistent with theism. So I think that is the strongest scientific argument there is against theism. I think it's even stronger than Darwin's theory of evolution.

I have another argument, but there is a character limit, so I will save it for later.

Thank you for this rich argument that you have responded back at me. I just had a hunch, just a hunch that your next argument will be on Gratuitous Evil? I was actually looking through the Internet one day, and I found out this website: http://infidels.org.... I looked through the website and found that your answer was very similar to his. I compared the two, and what did you know? They were exactly the same. How could this be? Well, this could only be a cause of copy-and-paste plagiarizing. Plagiarizing is not a way to go on in a proper debate and is illegal. You have obviously just added just one sentence in the front and back of your argument without real knowledge of the actual writing you have written. If you are a viewer, please see the comparison in between the two and judge for yourselves. Now, since this writing is not of your doing, I will consequently be nullifying this argument unless Con decides he will not copy-and-paste without real knowledge of the information he are plagiarizing off of. If you continue on with this, I will contact the administrators of this site to discontinue your plagiarizing and remove you from the site. Thank you.